Open Design Now! is a must read for anyone interested in Open Design. The book is a series of articles written by designers, design thinkers and educators to provide varied perspectives on the open design movement. Some see the movment as a far off idea, whereas others see the roots of open design in our recent and not so recent history.

This is great video by The Guardian featuring Nick Ierodiaconou discussing his OpenDesk project and the implications of open design. Throughout the video you get to see exactly how the “Edie Stool“, by brothers David Steiner and Joni Stiener, is fabricated. Then, Joni discusses his the stool, its inspiration and then provides a great look at the stools clever assembly method. Continue reading

The APTEK Bar in St. Petersburg, Russia was designed by the Dopludo Collective. The space is filled with CNC manufactured designs , but features three main pieces of furniture, all of which are open design! They have done an excellent adding other furniture that compliments the open design pieces as well as designing custom built-in’s that match the aesthetic perfectly. Continue reading

This opinion piece on the state of Open Design Furniture by Justin McGuirk covers a lot of the issues and the opportunites within open design. By outlining the process of building the “Stool” he gives a real world experience as to what a person would go through to build the stool and draws some very insightful conclusions. Continue reading

This is an excellent example of a designer publishing an open design and then end users modifying that design. This chair has already appeared in various forms ranging from a stool to a high back chair (and I mean a really high back chair) and also in a variety of materials. The entire design, manufacturing and design distribution of this chair highlight the possibilties of open design.

The Mozilla office is heralded as an open source office, and its hard to argue with the core idea. It’s modular, its attractive, and a seemingly very effecient space. But what intruged us here at ODF, is that presents an intriguing perpective on Open Design. Instead of distributing plans for full peices, instead they have created a single pice of hardware to create lamps, tables and more. Continue reading

The Desk is designed as a generous and flexible four person workstation. The sawtooth edge of the Desk top can be rotated to create individual sections, or to allow two or more colleagues to work co-operatively side by side, either side of the central cable tray. The original OpenDesk is an open-source project commissioned by Mint Digital.

SketchChair is an open-source software tool that allows anyone to easily design and build their own digitally fabricated furniture. SketchChair lets users design chairs using a simple 2d drawing interface, automatically generating the structure of a chair and testing its stability. Users can simulate sitting on a chair with a customisable figure of themselves, in order to test and refine the chair to ensure it will comfortably support them. Continue reading

Consisting of only 2 parts, a plywood shelf and spacer, the Italic shelf can be assembled in many ways and configurations to suit your needs. The shelf is very stable and strong as each part is locked by its own position and weight in a structure I developed and named “Controlled Collapse”. Basically, when the shelf is built high, it doesn’t loose its strength or stability.

Looking for a local 3D printer? Make XYZ is a great resource to find someone locally who can 3D print your designs. Even better you can pay, rick-free, through MakeXYZ and the just go pick up your finished 3D prints!